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Emerging Artists at the Hamburg Fair 2025
Wondering what we've got in-store at the coming Affordable Art Fair in Hamburg? Don't miss the Emerging Artists exhibition, showing the conceptual works of four artists which have their artistic focus in Berlin and Hamburg.
Hannah Weber-Heidenfels
Friday 20 June, 2025
Since 2012, the Emerging Artists exhibitions at Affordable Art Fair have given a curated platform to new, unrepresented talents.
Looking back at the last 12 years, the visibility generated by the Emerging Artist exhibitions has been integral in supporting and pushing artist’s careers within the difficult starting conditions of the art world.
Emerging Artists Hamburg 2025
The ‘Emerging Artists Hamburg 2025’ exhibition will be curated by Fair Manager Hannah Weber-Heidenfels, showing the conceptual works of three artists which have their artistic focus in Berlin and Hamburg: Paula Hoffmann, Anne Meerpohl, Penny Monogiou.
The exhibition will create a space of tranquility within the busy atmosphere at the fair and will give visitors the opportunity to reflect and to relate to the artworks themselves.
On display are three female artists whose large-scale, conceptual works each create their own immersive spatial worlds. Their practices reflect personal, political and structural themes, offering insights into questions of identity, materiality, and transformation and as well include feminist viewpoints and examine aspects that support and sustain our society, but often remain invisible.
Download our Emerging Artists e-reader for more information on the featured artists.
The participating artists this year:
In her work, Paula Hoffmann explores our built environment, its building materials, and the aesthetics of construction sites. She views architecture as an individual and collective culture of memory and draws parallels between the psyche and architecture. The facade forms the basis of her observation, as does the many different, delicate details that visually emerge when a building is dissected into its individual components. She defunctionalizes architectural elements to emphasize the emotional qualities of the material and their individual aesthetics.
She recreates them from other materials to emphasize their emotional and aesthetic qualities. For her, the material not only has a purely functional quality, but is also alive and functions as a store of memory. Her dimensional design is based on building standards. The color scheme is derived from industrial building materials.
Paula Hoffmann is also fascinated by the aesthetics of randomly occurring material combinations that arise from unloading and temporary storage on construction sites. Combinations of shapes and colors from different materials result, which will not be reunited in this form later, as they will subsequently be installed in different locations. When observing the different facade surfaces, she sees a psychological component. Here, she establishes a connection to the individual psyche, where, similar to a building, the substructure acts inwards and the facade acts outwards.
In her artistic works, Anne Meerpohl depicts organic forms and body structures, from which she creates a fictional landscape. The origin of her work lies in a curiosity about what our body is made of and what it looks like inside. In doing so, the painting also influences the canvas, which itself becomes organic, transforms, and becomes fluid through curves and extensions. The canvas enters into a dialogue with the forms, and the curves of the forms influence what can be seen in the picture.
The artist depicts various overlays, using pink, red, flesh-colored, yellowish, or transparent colors. These are not specific body parts, but rather analogies that can be seen. With her series of works, she paints her own landscapes, just as the view inside the body presents a very unique environment, another world into which one is immersed.
The body consists primarily of fluid; everything belongs together, which allows Anne Meerpohl to create a concept of connectedness in her work. Viewed from the inside of the body, ideals of beauty and social norms cannot be inferred. The kidneys and liver, in particular, are particularly significant to the artist, as these organs filter out many foreign and toxins. Penetrating the body’s interior represents a courageous and active act, which also results in an encounter with disgust and shame for the viewer, which the artist counteracts with an aestheticization of what actually defines us. Anne Meerpohl’s artistic work also takes a political and feminist stance: They make visible which elements perform maintenance work for us all the time, yet remain invisible in everyday life.
Penny Monogiou’s work incorporates socio-critical and post-colonial debates; in her artwork, she explores questions of cultural, sexual, and aesthetic identity. In doing so, she draws autobiographical references and questions socially established ideals of beauty.
The Temple of Athena depicted in this historical photograph is located on the Acropolis. It is supported by six caryatids – columns in the form of women. Instead of columns, the graceful burden bearers support the temple with apparent ease. The term “caryatid” is derived from the ancient city of Karyai, where women are said to have been enslaved and forced to carry heavy burdens. In this photograph of the Temple of Athena, Penny Monogiou has painted the caryatids in vibrant colors; they are depicted fluidly and freely, breaking away from their positions of responsibility, turning to one another, and enjoying a moment of peace.
Penny Monogiou also questions why the research findings that became known in the 1960s, according to which sculptures from classical antiquity were originally colored, have not been pursued further to this day. The ideal of beauty preferred in our Western society, which Penny Monogiou questions in her work, is also still strongly influenced by classical antiquity, which stands for evenness and uniform proportions. In Monogiou’s view, color in this context appears incompatible with an elitist, white-dominated world and is instead often associated with the cultures of the global South – something that could serve as an explanation for why the colorful design of ancient sculptures was excluded from public discourse for a long time.
In the autobiographical series ‘Das Gespenst geht um’, Penny Monogiou searches for her own identity. In these works, she depicts herself. She sits in the middle of the room and reflects on who she is, where she comes from, and what has made her the woman she is today. She presents herself as a woman, but her characteristics are more masculine and powerful than one would expect. The works reflect the characteristics of the three cultures that define her: her Cypriot origins, her cultural influences, Greece, and her current homeland, Germany. The foot with the sock bearing the German flag stands firmly on the ground. The emphasis shows that this is now her base.
Take a look back at our former Emerging Artist exhibitions which have been on display at the Affordable Art Fair.
You’ll be able to see all of these artworks within our ‘Emerging Artists Berlin 2025’ exhibition at our upcoming fair this November. Download our Emerging Artists e-reader for more information on the featured artists.